1. Curriculum and
Research in
Literacy and
Language Arts
Monday, July 22, 2013
Mixed Methods and Meta Analyses
Planning Your Intervention

2. Write a Blog Post
• Reflect on the experience of doing your lit review in
helping you to solve your instructional problem.
Was it helpful? Did you get ideas for practice?
What research studies did you gravitate towards?
Which seemed the most useful to practice? Which
seemed the most useful to developing theory?
What were challenges you faced in finding,
reading, thinking about the research you found?
Would you incorporate the process (save the
writing) into your teaching practice?

3. Mixed-Methods Designs
• Triangulation
• Differing perspectives provide a broader view of a
phenomenon.
• Typical combination: Looking at a larger sample
quantitatively and then a subset of that sample
qualitatively to provide a more in-depth
understanding of the larger results (e.g., Blum et al.,
2002)

4. Meta-Analysis
• What does the research say?
• Using statistics to look at a set of quantitative
research studies to see what larger patterns exist in
the literature.
• Can have same readability issues as quantitative
studies if one does not understand the statistical
analysis or results.

5. Literature Reviews
• What does the research say?
• Still question-based.
• A survey of the literature on a particular topic.
Differs from meta-analyses in that there is no
attempt to unify the studies statistically.
• Can give a broad overview of the literature, but is
constructed by the author who has biases, faults,
etc.
• Can include quantitative and qualitative studies.

6. Planning Your
Intervention
• Everyone’s intervention will look different.
o A routine you’ve developed to incorporate in your classroom.
o A unit plan description.
o Descriptions of activities you are adding to your tool box as a result of the
research.
• In depth, narrative. No lesson plans, but significant
handouts and rubrics should be included.
• Remember that your audience is other teachers.

7. The Discussion Section
• This is where you explicitly tie the research you cited
in your literature review with your practice.
• Show us your thought process. Implicitly, it might be
there. Make it explicit.
• Looking at the sample paper, identify three places
where the author ties her intervention practices to
the research she states.